Errors in Foreign Language Writing: English Grammar Errors among Arab 8th -Grade Students in Israel

תקציר

This study investigates English grammar errors produced by Arab students in Israel. It examines the types and number of errors found in 8th-grade Arab students’ English writing samples and how they correspond to their proficiency levels in English as a foreign language (EFL). A corpus of 180 writing samples was collected from sixty students and evaluated using Gass and Selinker’s (1994) framework based on Corder’s Error Analysis model (1974). This framework includes six stages: data collection, error identification, error classification, error quantification, analysis of error sources, and error remediation. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyze the data. The findings reveal fifteen grammatical errors produced by Arab EFL students in Israel; these are errors in tenses, fragments, pronouns, agreement, word order, prepositions, articles, parts of speech, plural forms, irregular verbs, infinitives, possession, conjunctions, relative pronoun omission, and voice. Tense errors were found to be the most frequent type of error, whereas voice errors were the least common. All errors were attributed to two primary sources: interlingual (stemming from the negative influence of first-language transfer, i.e., Arabic) and intralingual (arising from the incomplete or inaccurate knowledge of the target language, i.e., English). The study further identified significant statistical differences based on students’ English proficiency levels. Linguistically weaker students produced the highest number of grammatical errors, with fragments being the most challenging category for them. In contrast, the more advanced students made only a few errors, most of which were related to tenses.